Hooray for Hairywood

What do you get when you combine a phonograph from a Jacques Tati film with Rapunzel and Prince Charming? If you’re designing for Eley Kishimoto, you get a tower to display in Covent Garden Piazza.

The husband-and-wife team collaborated with 6a Architects to create Hairywood, a six-metre structure embellished by a carved periscope and featuring an elevated cabin to give visitors a new look at the piazza. Hairywood is part of the larger Skin + Bones exhibition by Somerset House and will be on display until 20 July.

“Fashion and architecture are very much in bed with each other currently,” Mark Eley says. “The tower itself is an amazing thing: a random exercise experimenting with public space that seems to have caught the imagination of many curious people.”

Eley and Wakako Kishimoto first worked with 6a two years ago at Fashion at Belsay in Northumberland, and Eley described this partnership as “interesting, challenging, easy, difficult, argumentative, explorative, funny and progressive.” Would they do something similar again? “Of course,” he says.